Booting from CD-ROM

Balfa

I don't think i've ever been able to boot from a CD on this machine. I've tried various bootable CDs (that work on other machines). I've set it up right in the bios (or so it seems) with ATAPI as the first boot device, but after verifying DMI pool, it says "Boot from ATAPI CD-ROM : failure".

My system is as follows:
Abit KT133A
Duron 850
Asus CD-S400


any ideas?

halfab

Do you have an internal ZIP drive installed??

I have noticed that sometimes if the ZIP is on the same channel as a CDROM, booting from CD could be difficult.

podgeb

In addition to the bios settings, your cdrom drive needs to be on the primary ide cable in order for cds to booted from the drive.
Putting the drive on the primary ide cable allows the cdrom drive to be bootable.

Saruman

Originally posted by podgeb
In addition to the bios settings, your cdrom drive needs to be on the primary ide cable in order for cds to booted from the drive.
Putting the drive on the primary ide cable allows the cdrom drive to be bootable.

This is in fact not true. it works on any controller. Most people have their CD rom on the secondary controller and their hard drive on the primary. My own has 2 drives, DVD and cdrw both on secondary controller and 2 hard drives on the primary and BOTH cdr's are bootable!! Then again maybe it depends on mobo/bios....

Is your cdrom in fact on the IDE channel?? Make sure its not on a seperate controller like a UATA card or maybe one of the raid channels on your mobo asssuming you have that.. Or if its scsi... if any of these are correct then choose to boot off scsi or other and it should check for these sources first... I assume though it is just standard IDE right? if so ignore this.

Balfa

agh. there is an IDE zip100 on the same controller as the cd... i should have tried it without this. i'm so crap at troubleshooting my own problems

I'll try in a bit and let you know what the result is.

Also, yes, i have a KT133A RAID. i should have mentioned this but i'm silly. But don't worry, my CD drive's on the primary IDE.

Btw, if the zip is the problem, er, is there a proper fix for that? i don't want to have to disconnect my zip drive every time i want to boot from cd

Balfa

actually, if that is the problem, i suppose i could just put the zip drive on the secondary IDE as my hard drive's on the RAID controller. *rubs chin thoughtfully*

Balfa

actually, if that is the problem, i suppose i could just put the zip drive on the secondary IDE as my hard drive's on the RAID controller. *rubs chin thoughtfully*

Balfa

I've finally gotten around to disconnecting the zip drive, but it hasn't helped

The CD drive really works perfectly apart from this. If there's a CD in, it'll spin up, then say "Boot Failed".
The CD boots fine on another machine.

RAID: 40GB hard drive
IDE primary: Asus CD-S400

no other IDE devices.

Any more ideas, please?

marauder

A few suggestions...

What CD are you trying to boot? Try XP or some version of windows

Does your system have a floppy and will it boot from that?

Does your system normally boot from the raid drive .. if so look in the raid controller bios to disable boot from raid.

Balfa

i've tried booting from XP, Me, SuSE linux (6.3 i think) and RedHat 7.

it will boot from floppy.

i'll try the raid thing, but i don't have high hopes. the bios is already set up to boot from atapi first, then raid

any more ideas?

marauder

The CD boots fine on another machine.

Did you try the drive in another machine. I had a floppy drive once that would not boot but did work for reading floppies.
Try another drive is all I can think of....

Balfa

i tried the RAID thing. it seems i select which device (IDE0-4, ATAPI, floppy, RAID, etc) in the mobo bios, and if i choose RAID, i can then set the specific drive on the RAID controller in the RAID BIOS, so it doesn't affect anything

anyone got a last idea?

spongebob

its there a predelay setting (seconds) in the bios

had problem with HD , win2k on it already, once. Wouldn't boot at 0 second predelay but 5 second predelay did the trick, its in the IDE settings in bios maybe or a setting on its own. ISTR it is set per drive and a CD takes a while to spin up ..more than a HD

M

Rew

Dosn't the CD-ROM drive itself have to support booting off it a well.....?

spongebob

a 2x or 4x may not be bootable , thats true

Balfa

i tried setting the delay, first to 5 then to 12 seconds. neither helped

you may be onto something though... it seems it comes back with the "failure" message about 4/5ths of the way through cdrom speeding up noise... i dunno if that's important.

this drive should definitely boot. it got really good reviews when it first appeared on the scene.

thanks for the advice, muck. any more ideas?

spongebob

15 secs ?